Chapter Eight Kiersten
Chapter Eight
Kiersten
Questions about the diaries absorbed Kiersten’s thoughts as she raced home from school pickup with the boys in the back of the minivan. Who was Dottie? Why were her diaries hidden inside a set of encyclopedias? How did they end up in her basement? And where did all that cash come from?
A missing uniform shirt eventually found balled up under Matt’s bed ensured that she would now leave just in time to hit peak rush hour traffic on the Beltway. A penalty administered by the universe for her many organizational failures, both in the laundry room and in life as a whole.
“Mom, why do I have to go to Matt’s baseball tournament?” asked James, one of her perpetually aggrieved middle children.
“Because Dad is gone, and I cannot leave you home alone overnight at the age of nine or the police will come and charge me with a crime.”
He squinted up at his mother, clearly unsure how much of this explanation was true and how much was hyperbole.
His eleven-year-old brother, Luke, snorted in derision as he climbed into the coveted third row. “You’re too little to stay home alone.”
“But I don’t want to go to Pennsylvania,” James said plaintively.
She flipped open the back hatch and inserted the many items piled beside the car: baseball bats, cleats, coolers, snacks, and overnight bags filled with goggles and swim trunks—because the team hotel had a pool—plus uniforms, one of which was white, for stunningly impractical reasons she would never understand.
As she finished, a flash of color in her neighbor’s yard caught her eye.
“Mom, who’s that?”
She turned to look, and her mouth dropped open.
In the yard next door, a tall blond woman raised her arms to the heavens like a priestess performing a powerful incantation and unfurled a blue-and-white-checked picnic blanket.
She spread it under the enormous sweet gum tree in front of her beautifully restored mid-century home, tastefully decorated for fall with autumnal gourds.
Two little girls scampered onto the picnic blanket, clad in white eyelet dresses.
The younger held a bouquet of wildflowers, which seemed to match the little crown of wildflowers adorning her head.
The older girl unpacked what appeared to be a vintage china teapot with matching teacups and set them on a tray.
Like their mother, the girls were lovely. Hair so blond it looked white, with rosy cheeks and blue eyes. It looked like a Fairy-Tale Princess Convention. Perhaps the small woodland creatures were stuck at the registration desk waiting for their name tags and would show up later.
Kiersten realized she was staring. “Good afternoon!” she called out in her friendliest voice, to prove she wasn’t a stalker.
Of course, her neighbor probably had lots of stalkers.
Kiersten would be happy to have stalkers, too, if she could be six feet tall and skinny, with lustrous blond hair and children who could lay out an entire picnic basket without breaking anything, fighting, or shooting each other with Nerf bullets.
Her neighbor stepped gracefully over the teapot and crossed the yard toward her.
They hadn’t actually met, but this neighbor had left a basket of delicious muffins on her front steps the day they moved in, along with a handwritten note on engraved stationery welcoming them to Beaverbrook Lane.
Kiersten racked her brain, trying to remember her neighbor’s name before she reached the driveway. It was something vaguely horticultural. Camilla? Azelea? Jasmine?
“Hi!” the woman said in a cheerful voice. “I’m Aspen Davis.”
“Kiersten Cleaver,” she replied, extending her hand.
Aspen didn’t shake her hand. Instead she embraced it, making a sort of hand sandwich between her own soft and manicured fingers.
Aspen looked her directly in the eye. “It is so wonderful to meet you.”
Kiersten felt a little stunned by this earnest welcome. “It’s a lovely day for a picnic,” she finally managed, recovering the ability to speak.
Her neighbor squinted at the horizon. “It is. The light is perfect.”
“We’re heading to a travel baseball tournament, but maybe we can get together when we get back. If you have time,” she added hastily. Perhaps spa treatments and shopping for picturesque aprons took up a large portion of her neighbor’s day.
“Oh, I have lots of time,” Aspen said with an airy wave.
“Where do your girls go to school?” Kiersten asked.
Aspen made an expansive gesture. “Here.”
“Hollin Terrace?” Kiersten asked. “That’s where the boys go too.”
“No. I mean here. At home. We homeschool Felicity Grace and Ella Joy.”
Kiersten felt herself blinking stupidly at these compound names and immediately felt inadequate for unimaginatively naming her children after their uncles and maternal and paternal grandfathers. Matthew. Luke. James. And Johnny. Sometimes she felt like an Uber driver for the apostles.
“Oh wow,” Kiersten said. “That’s impressive.”
“It’s actually so much easier.” Aspen shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted up at the late-afternoon sun. “We used to run around to preschool and dance lessons and all those things. Then we decided to slow down and live with intention, you know?”
Kiersten didn’t know, but she nodded as if she did.
“We summered in Scandinavia a few years ago,” Aspen said, as if this explained it all, “and we sort of fell in love with the culture.”
Kiersten wanted to be the kind of person who summered.
Instead, she was the kind of person who cleaned the walleye her husband caught at his family’s mildewed lake cabin in northern Minnesota, while swatting away mosquitoes the size of baby flamingos.
“And we just decided, why not live this way all year round?” Aspen continued, eyes wide, radiating a sort of butter-churned earnestness. “You only get one life. Why not live the way you really want to live?”
Her question hit Kiersten between the eyes like a rock from a slingshot. Why not live the way you really want to live?
But before she could ponder this philosophy more fully, angry shouts from the minivan pulled her attention away from this prophet in ballet flats.
“You stole my charger,” one of the boys hollered at his brother. Kiersten stifled a sigh. Time to hit the road.
She glanced at her watch. “I have to get going, but it was so nice to finally meet you. And thanks for the muffins when we moved in.”
As she turned to leave, a strikingly handsome man approached and rested his hand on Aspen’s shoulder. He wore a perfectly tailored sports coat with pressed khaki pants and a white shirt with no tie. He looked like a Brooks Brothers model at a party on someone’s yacht.
He turned to her with a charming smile.
And you must be Ken. “I’m Kiersten,” she said instead, extending her hand.
“Trey Davis.” He squeezed her hand in a tight grip and flashed a dazzling smile, exposing arctic-white teeth. “Great to have you in the neighborhood. It’s good to have another family with young kids here on the cul-de-sac.”
“We didn’t even know that house was on the market.” Aspen stooped to adjust her daughter’s flower garland.
“That’s probably because it wasn’t on the market,” Kiersten said. “We met Henry and Myrtle DiLorenzo through a family friend. We did the whole transaction without a real estate agent.”
“Saints preserve us.” Trey spread his hands across his chest in mock horror. “We can’t have any more of that.”
“Babe, let it go.” Aspen punched her husband’s shoulder playfully. “Trey and his dad are developers and home builders,” she explained, turning back to Kiersten. “Trey also does real estate. He hates to see a great property sold to anyone but him.”
Trey grinned down at his wife. “True. And if you ever decide to sell, let me know. You have a huge lot. With water views, if you cut down all those trees.” Then his eyes narrowed. “I know how much you paid for it. The very definition of a steal.”
Kiersten felt her face flush. Was he implying that they had somehow defrauded Henry and Myrtle?
“Grammy, Grampy, come say hello,” Aspen called out, waving to an elderly couple making their way down the sidewalk.
They moved slowly, the husband tall and erect, while his wife, white haired and stooped with osteoporosis, clutched his arm for support.
She reminded Kiersten of a butterfly—fragile but lovely. Wrinkles creased her face, but high cheekbones and wide eyes hinted at beauty in her youth.
“I’m Margaret Davis,” she said, giving Kiersten a faint smile.
The older man beside her didn’t share his grandson’s dimpled chin and chiseled jawline, but his white hair and erect posture gave him a courtly air.
“And I’m Richard Davis.” He extended his hand. “Trey is our grandson, and Aspen is our granddaughter-in-law. And these beautiful little girls are our great-granddaughters.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kiersten said.
“We’re about to have a tea party with Grammy here.” Aspen gestured at the teapot and macarons the little girls had spread across the picnic blanket.
“As long as you help me up once I sit down,” Margaret said. “Getting up is harder than it looks when you’re eighty-one years old.”
“Of course, Grammy. You know we will.” Aspen turned to Kiersten with an adorable shrug. “Grammy is super popular on the ’Gram.”
Kiersten blinked, suddenly feeling stupid.
Was Aspen talking about Instagram? Or some entirely new form of Substack, Slack, Signal, Bluesky, WhatsApp, Discord, Snapchat, or Threads?
Sometimes she wished people could go back to sending postcards and clipping articles from the newspaper, like her grandmother did.
“Well, I don’t want to keep you from your tea party,” she said, manufacturing a smile.
“We’re super glad you’re here,” Aspen said, radiating warmth. “And we’d love to get to know you and your boys. And your husband too. Come say hi when you get back. We’re always home. Stop by anytime.”
Kiersten nodded. “I’ll do that.”
“Nice to meet you,” Trey called out without looking up from his phone.
Kiersten gave a cheery goodbye wave as she retreated through the border of hydrangeas marking the property line.
She hauled herself into the driver’s seat of her minivan, and her smile evaporated when a rolled-up sock flew through the air and bounced off the back of her head. One of the boys had chucked it at Matthew, who as the oldest brother had claimed the right to sit in the front passenger seat.
She tossed the sock behind her as her mind replayed the conversation she’d just had with her new neighbors.
She wasn’t entirely sure about Trey, the husband.
He reminded her of Garrett’s boss, the secretary of agriculture, who she’d met at her one and only Washington cocktail party, a man who constantly scanned the room, looking for someone more important to talk with.
But Aspen and the old couple seemed lovely.
She cast an envious glance at her neighbor as she left the cul-de-sac and began her interminable rush hour journey toward the Mystic Hills baseball complex in Pennsylvania, where she would spend the weekend with hundreds of other baseball-obsessed parents and kids.
What would it be like, to drop out of everything? To be home all the time manifesting abundance in a cotton apron while your children played harmoniously in the backyard?
A Nerf bullet whizzed past her ear. She swore under her breath and yelled, “Knock. It. Off.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror. The back of the minivan looked like a homeless encampment. Each boy sat huddled under a blanket to block out the light, watching movies or, far more likely, inappropriate YouTube videos on their iPads.
When she looked away, one last Nerf bullet sailed toward the front of the car. She sighed. How many times had she told them not to fire weapons inside a moving vehicle?
Normally at this point, she’d stop the car and threaten to turn around and go home right this instant if they didn’t stop.
But that only worked if her passengers actually wanted to reach their destination. If she threatened to turn the car around now, everyone would cheer.
Why was she always driving to places no one wanted to go?
Was Aspen Davis right? Could her family really travel a completely different road?